Analog -- The Reference Library

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Orbiter,
Julie E. Czerneda, Trifolium Books, $13.95, 168 pp. (ISBN: 1552440206).

Last spring, I was invited to speak at a teacher’s workshop on cosmology at the Wright Center for Innovative Science Education at Tufts University, outside Boston. My topic was to be "Using Science Fiction to Teach Science," I developed a suitable PowerPoint presentation (already scheduled for repeat at a couple of cons), and it went well when the day (June 28th) came. More to the point of this column, another speaker at the workshop was Julie E. Czerneda, an SF writer and science educator who has developed a series of anthologies for use in schools. The series began with Packing Fraction, which contained five stories by Charles Sheffield, Jan Stirling, Robert J. Sawyer, Josepha Sherman, and Czerneda herself. The latest is Orbiter, with five more by Eric Choi, Annette Griessman, Mark Canter, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Anne Bishop. As before, the point is to illuminate themes in elementary science education. Bishop’s "A Strand in the Web" deals with the complexities of ecosystems, which require a balance of eater and eaten, how easy it is to upset the balance, and human responsibility. Trudel’s "Tether" deals with a novel way to generate electricity (actually tested in a Shuttle experiment) that illuminates the relationship between magnetic fields and electric current. Reading levels are suitable for grade-school readers, and the stories’ tone and complexity are reminiscent of 1940-1950 Astounding.

Czerneda’s anthologies come with companion books for the teachers, offering loads of exercises to get the kiddies thinking. She demonstrated a few at the workshop: one involved handing out slips with science-related headlines on them and asking folks to imagine implications; my group got "Canadian Scientists Discover Proto-Beaver" and had great fun imagining a fossilized men’s magazine.

Okay. Stop snickering. That’s what she told us, too, and then she moved on, just as I must here.

Why me? Why Julie? Well, we’re both judges for the Webs of Wonder contest (http://www.analogsf.com/wow/main.shtml), jointly sponsored by Analog and David Brin (who has provided the prize money). The contest’s aim is to foster Internet sites that combine teaching with good science fiction, in the process generating "new resources for educators, using distinguished science fiction stories, novels and films to complement regular curriculum materials, helping teachers spark enthusiasm and convey difficult subjects in the classroom."

Why bother? If you haven’t noticed, SF is more popular than ever–in the forms of TV, film, and video games. But the SF readership is aging and declining in numbers. It has been suggested that this is in part due to the field’s failure to recruit new readers, and the contest–and my and Julie’s efforts at the workshop–is an attempt to get SF into the schools, get the kids hooked, and rejuvenate the field.

We probably can’t hope to do as much good as J. K. Rowling, though. When my fiancée and I went to see the Harry Potter movie with her nephews, it was a wonder to see the boys saying afterwards that the book was better. Rowling is making kids want to read.

Burning the Ice,
Laura J. Mixon, TOR, $25.95, 544 pp. (ISBN: 0312869037).

Laura J. Mixon (last reviewed here in January 1999, for Proxies, "a thriller with brains") has a new novel out, and Burning the Ice is well worth your attention. The setting is Brimstone, a frozen world that apparently once had life–there is oxygen in the frigid air, though the colonists need breathing masks, and there is fossil fuel. The colonists dwell in deep caverns. Beneath kilometers of ice there are deep seas, and there roam the waldoes controlled by young Manda, a solitary misfit in a world of clones.

Clones? Reproduction is in vats, in a sort of batch mode, so that each "birth" delivers two or more built from the same template (which can be reused later on–clone groups have members of all ages, though vat-mates have a special bond). Manda’s vat-mate died before birth, aboard the Exodus, the ship that brought the colonists and then supposedly moved on to another star, and Mixon hints early on that there was more to the tragedy than simple fluke. Growing up, Manda was a misfit, picked on, angry. Now she chooses solitary work whenever she can, and the exploratory waldoes are her special project, searching for hints of life beneath the ice, for vent-systems, for the sources of the strange noises the waldoes sometimes hear.

And then she is visited by a ghost. Well, not quite. The colonists are plugged into a computer system that lets them see data, controls, and others as if they floated in the air, not on screens, and the computers are powerful enough to run programs called syntellects. One such syntellect is Ur-Carli, a digital version of Carli D’Auber, the elder who came with the vat-grown colonists from the ship and mentored them until she vanished. Occasionally Ur-Carli dons a virtual avatar or even a humanoid waldo to interact with the colonists. Now such an avatar leads Manda away from the networked portions of the colony’s cavern home to a frozen room equipped with a telescope and a view of the sky. Carli’s mummified body is in a neighboring room.

When Manda wants to reveal the body to the rest of the colonists so Carli can have the honor due upon her death, Ur-Carli says no: "You mustn’t tell anyone. There’s a reason. I know other secrets also."

Meanwhile, aboard the Exodus, the crèche-born, the originals of the colonial clones, sheltered in tanks while they live prolonged lives in virtuality, reveal nasty plots and schemes. They are not on their way to another star at all. They await the terraforming of Brimstone and the moment when they will return and take over. The colonists will be slaves.

But they don’t know that. Nor will they till well after Manda discovers intelligent life in the seas, loses a waldo, struggles to rescue it before its antimatter containment can be breached by inquisitive alien tentacles, and discovers that something is interfering with her control of the waldoes. When a quake shatters the caverns and destroys far too many essential resources, she struggles with the rest to rescue the buried and salvage the ruined. She uses the hidden telescope, discovers a secret herself (one that makes her think help is available), tries to tell the governing council, and is hushed up. She finds love and nearly loses it.

And then . . . the crèche-born are not happy about Manda’s sub-sea discovery. They want a world for themselves, one they have to share neither with other humans nor with aliens. They are schemers and manipulators and hackers to boot. But Manda has talents, and she is learning that despite the estrangement she has always felt as a singleton, she has capable friends as well. The battle is joined, and the outcome . . . You can imagine it, or you can buy the book and read it. I recommend the latter. Mixon has done an excellent job of imagining a world of ice, a society of clone-groups, a heroine who comes nicely alive for the reader, and a unique alien. Enjoy.

Shadow Puppets,
Orson Scott Card, TOR, $25.95, 348 pp. (ISBN: 0-765-30017-6) (leather-bound, $200, 0765304759).

In recent years, Orson Scott Card has been taking advantage of the fame he earned with Ender’s Game (reviewed here July 1985) by following the adventures of Bean, the spunky little genius who infuriated the psychopathic Achilles so badly that after Ender had won the war and left for the colonies, Achilles had the rest of the Battle School brats kidnapped. Bean, in service to Ender’s brother Peter, the Hegemon, defeated him, but only temporarily. Achilles had a way of landing on his feet; he could flee the collapse of his schemes in Russia to India, flee India to China, and with China ruling a large swath of the world . . . See Ender’s Shadow (reviewed January 2000) and Shadow of the Hegemon (April 2001).

And here is Shadow Puppets, beginning as Peter Wiggin receives a message that a certain personage needs rescuing from China. Bean, tall now but doomed to a short life by the genetic tweaking that made him what he is, sees the trap: Achilles cannot be trusted; just when Peter thinks he is most under control, he must plan to spring a trap and bring all down. He and Petra, who loves him, immediately resign from the Hegemon’s service and flee, hoping to survive long enough to prepare a plan that will save the day. Petra has a hope of her own–to persuade Bean to marry her and let her bear his children. Meanwhile, their friend Virlomi also flees the Hegemon’s employ to raise in India a subtle rebellion against the Chinese conquerors. Here is a fertility lab run by a demon from the past, and most of Bean’s precious children are lost. Here is an Arab League ready to retake its rightful place among the world’s rulers, led by a caliph who was once at the Battle School with Bean and the rest. Here is war, the defeat of evil, a renewal of promise in Bean’s soon-to-be-child, and . . .

The defeat of evil? Is the series over? Well, there are those missing embryos, and evil is a weed that is impossible to kill. Perhaps the next will pit Bean’s children against each other.

When Card started writing of the Shadows of Ender Wiggin, some thought him lazy, riding his own coattails. But the shift of focus has been fruitful, and a true dynastic saga may be about to unfold.

Characters familiar from the first two books populate Probability Space, which opens as Tom Capelo’s daughter Amanda, age fourteen-going-on-twenty, takes advantage of daddy’s absence from the house to try on her late mother’s dress. Daddy returns unexpectedly, she hides, and then daddy is kidnapped. Being a smart kid, she flees. Unfortunately, she immediately falls into the hands of a rebel group who actually decide to help her along, first to the Moon, where she tries to find the Sensitive Marbet, and then to Mars. Meanwhile, Marbet and Lyle Kaufman are trying to get back to World. And a military coup, led by Pierce, a man who would gleefully use a twelve-gauge shotgun to kill flies in his bedroom, is in the works.

A shotgun to kill flies? Would Pierce really take the Protector Artifact to Faller turf and activate it at the most dangerous setting? Would he really risk the universe? And is there any way to stop him?

While Amanda manages to survive the wrecking of large parts of Martian infrastructure and make kissy-kissy friends with the scion of a Greek gigafortune, Lyle and Marbet do their damnedest. And if the war with the Fallers thereby comes to an abrupt end, it isn’t the end anyone could expect. Certainly not ace physicist Tom Capelo, whose equations are not perfect. Nor the great negotiators Lyle and Marbet, who, says Capelo, look like snake-oil salesmen beside the brilliant deceiver who saves the day.

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The Skinner,
Neal Asher, Macmillan, £9.99, 474 pp.
(ISBN: 0333903641).

I didn’t see British writer Neal Asher’s first novel, Gridlinked, but Macmillan sent me his second, The Skinner, and I want to tell you this fellow has success written all over him. If he keeps it up, you have a lot of reading pleasure ahead.

The setting is the world of Spatterjay, named after Jay Hoop, who with his seven cohorts established an unprecedented record of bloody savagery made possible by two factors: the world itself and the alien Prador.

First, the world: Spatterjay’s life-forms are infected by a "virus" that makes it possible for them to regenerate lost flesh. The virus is so effective that fishermen rip the meat from their catch and throw back the head and spine to regrow the rest of the body! It works for humans too, and the longer one has been infected, the stronger one becomes and the harder it is for anything to kill you. Wounds close immediately. Lost limbs regrow. And it’s a good thing, too, for Spatterjay’s dominant predator is the leech, which gloms on, chews out a circular plug of flesh, and leaves the prey to regrow the plug. Humans don’t appreciate being forced to donate to the food chain, so they tend to stomp the leech if they get a chance, grab the plug, and screw it back into the hole.

Pain remains, though. Since Jay Hoop and his friends doted on pain, they thought Spatterjay quite an idyllic spot. They could seize the local residents and torture them endlessly, chortling all the while.

Second, the Prador: These crab-like aliens lose their limbs on adulthood. Their young, enslaved by pheromones, serve as arms and legs. So can human beings, if their brains and spinal cords are removed ("cored") and replaced by cybernetic thrall units. Jay Hoop et al. discovered that there was a lucrative trade in capturing people, infecting them with the virus so they would heal properly, coring them, and selling them to the Prador. Since the rest of humanity objected, there was a war. The Prador lost, and Spatterjay was cleaned up, though Hoop et al. managed to disappear.

Now the war is centuries past. Spatterjay’s locals are known as Hoopers, and the virus is for sale to all who crave immortality. And arriving at the port is the reif ("reification") Sable Keech, a dead man animated by serum, motors, and AI, once a lawman who hunted Jay Hoop’s dread crew, now a hunter on the trail of Jay Hoop himself, who rumors tell became the Skinner of the title, a monster whose head lives in a box aboard a Hooper ship and whose body roams an island. Also arriving are Erlin, a scientist looking for a reason to keep on living (immortality is booorrring!), and Janer, a man who serves the Hive (plain old Earthly hornets turned out to have intelligence; now they roam the galaxy).

Erlin and Janer are soon off on a Hooper ship, looking for Erlin’s old friend Ambel, an old captain so long infected by the virus that he does not even bleed when cut. It isn’t long before Keech is attacked by hired assassins, and then Asher puts on display the Prador chieftain who was once Jay Hoop’s main customer. Now the Prador chieftan, Ebulan, is arming Hoop’s one-time lover Rebecca Frisk, whose taste for sadism is no whit diminished by the centuries, to hunt down Keech. But Ebulan has other schemes in mind as well, and everything must culminate on Skinner’s island.

There is inventive world-building, plot with momentum, action in plenty, characters with pasts and complex motivations. But the most interesting character of all may be the antique war-drone Sniper, who sasses the warden AI that supervises Spatterjay, confronts the Prador warbots with insouciance, and in the end finds a kind of apotheosis.

Why do I mention it here? Perhaps it is enough to say that Morgan is the pseudonym of a certain well-known SF writer. If not, well, it’s a fun book anyway.

So here, for the legions of Brin fans, is Contacting Aliens: An Illustrated Guide to David Brin’s Uplift Universe, wherein Brin describes and Kevin Lenagh draws the Tandu and Gubru, Bahtwin and Thennanin, Tymbrimi and Tytlal, Luber and Puber, Soro and Synthians, and more. Get this one to keep bodily configuration, biology, sociology, and history straight as you reread the canon and struggle to make sense of the galactic political circus that makes life difficult for humans and their uplifted "clients"; dolphins and chimps.

So is The Literature of Science Fiction Film Series, which restores ten films produced by James Gunn in the early ’70s covering Forrest Ackerman, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak, and Jack Williamson discussing the history of the field. You can see excerpts at http://dmznyc.com/shtml/cssf%20films.1.shtml.